After the Second World War, Germany was split into four occupation zones, each run by the major Allied powers. The Soviet zone eventually became East Germany, and the American, British, and French zones were combined to form West Germany. The Western Allies independently agreed to reciprocal military liaison and monitoring agreements with the Soviets where each party could send small groups of uniformed military personnel with quasi-diplomatic status to drive clearly marked cars around their counterparts’ zones (with the exception of marked restricted areas) to perform reconnaissance. Western MLM’s started their tours in Potsdam at their country’s respective Mission House. While these MLM’s were intended to relieve Cold War tensions due to the East’s and West’s mutual suspicion, these tours were also an opportunity to gather critical military intelligence on military equipment and troop movements. Although they were intended to be peaceful, non-covert missions, western Military Liaison Missions (MLM) often used more clandestine methods, such as temporarily removing insignia from uniforms to reconnoiter on foot, dig through discarded garbage, steal equipment, and secretly photograph sensitive sites.[1] There were some incidents when western MLM’s were pursued and rammed by local East German or Soviet authorities, detained, and in at least one case even killed [2]. The MLM’s continued officially until October 2, 1990 when Germany re-unified.
The British mission was the “British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany”, abbreviated as “BRIXMIS”. BRIXMIS was the largest, with 31 individuals at any time, and first MLM agreed to with the Soviets in the Robertson-Malinin Agreement on September 16, 1947. It formally operated until December 31, 1990, though some BRIXMIS staff conducted similar operations until the end of 1993 to ensure the Soviets would fully withdraw from the former East Germany. BRIXMIS was famous for recovering then-new Soviet military technology and employing creative means to obtain specifications and intelligence, for example taking the barrel impression of a BMP-2’s 30mm cannon using an apple.[3]
The shirt is a standard issue cotton British General Service (GS) shirt[4] named to Captain Phil Richardson, who was active as a tour NCO with BRIXMIS from the late 1970’s [5] through the 1980’s [6].
Tag:
Text is washed out.
Pockets:
Patches:
Epaulettes:
Rank slips use the same DPM material as Pattern 68 smocks.
Cuffs:
Button:
Usage Photos:
